ESA hosts GMES session at ‘Towards eEnvironment’ conference

Global Monitoring for Environment and Security

24 March 2009

The exchange of environmental information will be the focus of the ‘Towards eEnvironment’ conference held this week in Prague. ESA will host a GMES session to discuss the status of the programme and demonstrate how its services are helping users.

The conference, held in the framework of the Czech Republic’s European Union presidency, is dedicated to information exchange among scientists, public administrations, EU institutions, environmental agencies and institutions involved in environmental information processing, as well as end-users of the information.

ESA’s Dr Volker Liebig, Director of the Earth Observation Programmes, will deliver an opening speech at the conference where he will present the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme and the GMES Space Component.

GMES is an EU-led initiative in partnership with ESA to combine ground- and space-based observations to develop an integrated environmental monitoring capability. ESA’s role within GMES is to implement its space component, which involves developing the five Sentinel satellites and coordinating contributions from Member States, the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Eumetsat) and other mission operators.

The GMES session will brief users, decision-makers and industry representatives on the status of the programme. It will also provide an overview of how Central and Eastern European countries can participate in the programme, the space segment and the services.

The session will bring representatives of institutions and end-users together, with special emphasis placed on end-users from new Member States. Concrete examples of GMES land and atmosphere services that could benefit end-users in the region will be presented.

ESA will also host a small exhibition area at the conference. The conference will conclude by drawing up a Memorandum on the Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS) and the Single Information Space in Europe for the Environment (SISE) in cooperation with GMES and the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE).

The main contributions concerning GMES will focus on:

GMES seen from the perspective of the EU

GMES seen from the perspective of ESA

GMES as an efficient European tool to harmonise data collection, provision and final use

GMES services for end-users from new EU member countries

GMES atmosphere and land services for users.

The conference, to be held 25-27 March at Masaryk University, is being organised by the Ministry of Environment of the Czech Republic, the European Commission, the European Environment Agency, ESA, the Czech Space Office and other Czech institutions.